“More than 50 conditions can cause or mimic the symptoms of dementia.” but “Alzheimer’s (can only be) distinguished from other dementias at autopsy.” — from a Harvard University Health Publication entitled “What’s Causing Your Memory Loss? It Isn’t Necessarily Alzheimer’s”

“Medications have now emerged as a major cause of mitochondrial damage, which may explain many adverse effects. All classes of psychotropic drugs have been documented to damage mitochondria, as have statin medications, analgesics such as acetaminophen, and many others.” – Drs Neustadt and Pieczenik, authors of “Medication-induced Mitochondrial Damage and Disease”

“We are at the beginning of the biggest medical tragedy that mankind has ever witnessed. Never before in history has the medical establishment knowingly created a life-threatening nutrient deficiency in millions of otherwise healthy people, only to sit back with arrogance and horrific irresponsibility and watch to see what happens. I cannot help to view my once great profession with a mixture of sorrow and contempt.” — Peter Langsjoen, MD, Board-certified Cardiologist, discussing the adverse effects of statin drugs that commonly cause serious, difficult-to-detect statin-induced CoQ10 deficiencies in the mitochondria of heart muscle, the central nervous system, and other body tissues. Dr Langsjoen has said that he sees several cases of statin-induced congestive heart failure in his clinical practice each week.

“It is also noted that instances of pure forms of Alzheimer’s disease, in the absence of other coexistent brain disease processes, such as infarctions or Parkinson’s disease–related lesions, are relatively uncommon.” — Daniel Perl, MD, Mt Sinai School of Medicine (2010) More

55 years ago (July 2, 1961) an American literary icon, Ernest Hemingway, committed suicide at his beloved vacation retreat in Ketchum, Idaho. He had just flown to Ketchum after being discharged from a psychiatric ward at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN where he had received a series of electroconvulsive “treatments” (ECT) for a life-long depression that had started after he had experienced the horrors of World War I. In the “War To End All Wars” he had been a non-combatant ambulance driver and stretcher-bearer.

One of Hemingway’s wartime duties was to retrieve the mutilated bodies of living and dead humans and the body parts of the dead ones from the Italian sector of the WWI battle zone. In more modern times his MOS (military occupational specialty) might have been called Grave’s Registration, a job that – in the Vietnam War – had one of the highest incidences of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that arose in that war’s aftermath.

Hemingway, just like many of the combat-induced PTSD victims of every war, was likely haunted for the rest of his life by the horrific images of the wounded and dead, so there was no question that he had what was later to be understood as combat-induced PTSD with depression, panic attacks, nightmares, auditory and/or visual hallucinations and insomnia. More

False. Actually the FDA only reviews studies that were designed, administered, secretly performed and paid for by the multinational profit-driven drug companies. The studies are frequently farmed out by the pharmaceutical companies by well-paid research firms, in whose interest it is to find positive results for their corporate employers. Unsurprisingly, such research policies virtually guarantee fraudulent results.

Myth # 2:

“FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is effective long-term”

False. Actually, FDA approval doesn’t even mean that psychiatric drugs have been proven to be safe – either short-term or long-term! The notion that FDA approval means that a psych drug has been proven to be effective is also a false one, for most such drugs are never tested – prior to marketing – for longer than a few months (and most psych patients take their drugs for years). The pharmaceutical industry pays many psychiatric “researchers” – often academic psychiatrists (with east access to compliant, chronic, already drugged-up patients) who have financial or professional conflicts of interest – some of them even sitting on FDA advisory committees who attempt to “fast track” psych drugs through the approval process. For each new drug application, the FDA only receives 1 or 2 of the “best” studies (out of many) that purport to show short-term effectiveness. The negative studies are shelved and not revealed to the FDA. In the case of the SSRI drugs, animal lab studies typically lasted only hours, days or weeks and the human clinical studies only lasted, on average, 4- 6 weeks, far too short to draw any valid conclusions about long-term effectiveness or safety!

Hence the FDA, prescribing physicians and patient-victims should not have been “surprised” by the resulting epidemic of SSRI drug-induced adverse reactions that are silently plaguing the nation. Indeed, many SSRI trials have shown that those drugs are barely more effective than placebo (albeit statistically significant!) with unaffordable economic costs and serious health risks, some of which are life-threatening and known to be capable of causing brain damage.

Myth # 3:

“FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is safe long-term”

False.Actually, the SSRIs and the “anti-psychotic” drugs are usually tested in human trials for only a couple of months before being granted marketing approval by the FDA. And the drug companies are only required to report 1 or 2 studies (even if many other studies on the same drug showed negative, even disastrous, results). Drug companies obviously prefer that the black box and fine print warnings associated with their drugs are ignored by both consumers and prescribers. One only has to note how small the print is on the commercials.

“Still psychiatrists went on behaving as if antipsychotics were essentially benign and arguing that they were necessary to prevent an underlying toxic brain disease (7). Andreasen’s 2011 paper was widely publicized however, and it started to be acknowledged that antipsychotics can cause brain shrinkage. Almost as soon as the cat was out of the bag, however, attention was diverted back to the idea that the real problem is the mental condition.”

Antipsychotic Drugs and Brain Shrinkage

Over the 40 years that I practiced medicine, I slowly became aware of the fact that drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier and thus impact the brain, especially those marketed for so-called mental illnesses (of unknown etiology), only mask symptoms and never cure anything – despite what the attractive, trinket-bearing salespersons from Big Pharma proclaimed as they were trying to convince me to prescribe their latest over-priced drugs (while at the same time abandoning the tried and true cheaper generics I had been using successfully for years).

When I went to medical school, we were taught that the relatively few psychiatric drugs available in the decade of the 1960s were too dangerous for us lowly family practitioners to prescribe safely. However, sometime between then and the generation of the 1980s, Big Pharma started flexing its Big Business muscles, started having previously restricted drugs available over-the-counter, started ignoring the psychiatrists (who coveted the monopoly they had had on psych meds), and started marketing heavily those same dangerous drugs so that we lowly family practitioners would help them increase their “market share”.

Living in a rural area where there were no psychiatrists to make wholesale diagnoses of mental illnesses (of “unknown etiology”) that supposedly warranted life-long drugging, I wasn’t asked by very many of my patients for psych drug treatment. But then came along Prozac.

The one time that I was asked by a patient to prescribe Prozac for her (a so-called selective [a lie] serotonin reuptake inhibitor [SSRI]), I was totally unaware that I had been deceived by Eli Lilly’s commercials and its drug reps when I was told how Prozac was supposed to work. They also skipped over (or were ignorant of) what were the serious potential dangers of the drug, especially the long-term dangers which included suicide, homicide, addiction, brain damage, sleep disorders, mania, psychosis, dementia, permanent sexual dysfunction, etc, etc. That patient didn’t take her Prozac for more than two weeks before it pooped out. But it got me curious about what synthetic, fluorinated, amphetamine-based chemicals like the SSRIs can do to the brain. More

Over the years, I have formally taught my patients (as well as many participants in my lectures and seminars) about the un-advertised dangers of psychiatric medications – especially the long-term brain alterations and drug-dependencies that drug companies don’t test for before the FDA grants them marketing approval.

Since my retirement from my holistic, non-drug, mental healthcare practice, I have continued to issue written warnings about the multitude of serious, sometimes even lethal, albeit unintended (and untested for), adverse consequences of taking psychiatric drugs, especially over the long-term.

My warnings have usually been directed at my fellow healthcare practitioners, nurses, social workers, clergypersons, journalists, legislators, various industry groups, and the public in general, but there seems to have been no audible response from most of them concerning the dangers to the very people that these professions are supposed to be caring for.

The information that I have relied on to treat my (subtly or overtly) drug-intoxicated patients came from many sources. Among those sources were 1) various peer-reviewed (albeit obscure) neuroscience journals, 2) whistle-blowing (and therefore often ostracized) psychiatrists, physicians, neuroscientists and medical journalists, and 3) my own extensive research into the basic neuroscience literature (which I had never had time to read as a busy family practitioner – barely having time to read the drug-industry-approved and subsidized mainstream medical journals).

In my Duty to Warn columns, I have often written about my concerns for the victims of brain-altering drugs, who, in my professional experience, had become dependent on (addicted to) any number of neurotoxic and psychotoxic drugs that Big Pharma had falsely assured me were not addictive.

Ignoring the essential reality about drug dependency and toxicity has caused many psychiatric patients (and their prescribing practitioners) to miss the fact that when the patients ran out of their meds or attempted to quit the drugs that were sickening them, they often became ill with entirely new symptoms that were the reasons for starting the drugs. (Quitting a psych drug can be as medically hazardous as starting one.)

The withdrawal symptoms that my patients experienced were always different from the symptoms that prompted the initial prescriptions, and they had been uniformly mis-diagnosed as a “recurrence” of the so-called “mental illness”, and therefore the offending drugs had usually been restarted, usually at higher doses, often with additional new drugs being added to counteract the new withdrawal symptoms.

I have also tried to alert the public, especially the media, about the epidemic of mass shootings that have been perpetrated by shooters whose brains, cognition and behaviors had been altered by psychiatric drugs. The mainstream media, not wanting to implicate the drug companies that advertise with them, prefer to demonize the folks that had been made “mentally ill” by the toxic culture rather than to the toxic drugs that can cause normal stressed-out, sleep-deprived and brain-malnourished folks, including the scores of male adolescent school shooters, to act like they are mentally ill.

Nevertheless, even medical journalists, especially those writing for major media outlets, have refused to even hint at (or been forbidden to write about by their editors or publishers) the strong connections between psychiatric drug intoxication and the epidemic of mass murder/suicide that continue to (intentionally?) confuse everybody. And so the shootings continue and the drug-marketers, drug-prescribers and other drug-profiteers continue risking the public health; and they continue getting off scot-free, never being charged as accomplices to the crimes. Just witness the pathetic failure of the defense attorneys for the Zoloft-intoxicated (150 mg per day!!) and Klonopin-intoxicated Batman Shooter from mounting a logical defense that could easily have convinced any intelligent jury to declare James Holmes of being “guilty” but temporarily insane because of his psychiatric drug-intoxication.

Guest: Bruce Wiseman
Bruce Wiseman is the U.S. President of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. He has testified before bodies of both houses of the United States Congress, as well as state legislative and judicial bodies in Colorado, Arkansas, New Jersey, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Florida. He has also testified before the Food and Drug Administration; the President’s Commission on Mental Health; the President’s Commission to Reform Special Education; and the National Institute of Mental Health’s Consensus Conference on ADHD. He has made more than 800 radio and television appearances including CNN, Fox National News, NBC’s Dateline and The Montel Williams show, and has been quoted in print media across the country, including The New York Times. He has a Master’s Degree, Summa Cum Laude, in American History from the California State University at San Jose, and is the former Chairman of the Department of History of John F. Kennedy University. Mr. Wiseman is the author of the compelling book, Psychiatry: The Ultimate Betrayal and for five years hosted the acclaimed, nationally syndicated radio show, Take America Back.

Federal Law Could Allow Once Criminal Marketing of Psychotropic Drugs to Now Occur With Impunity—Increase Drug Risks Especially to Children & the Elderly